Make image background transparent Photoshop

Occasionally, you may want to use images with transparent backgrounds in your slides, especially for logos and so on that appear on multiple slides. Unlike some other applications, Google Slides isn’t able to make an image background transparent. You usually need to edit your image using Photoshop or some other program that can manipulate images.

There are a couple of alternative ways that make this task a little easier.

is a clever (and currently free while in beta) tool that makes it really easy to make a background transparent. It’s simply a matter of dragging, dropping, and mapping out the background, with the online tool doing the hard work for you.

After uploading your image, you’ll see two copies of it side by side on the screen. With the provided red and green brushes, mark in green everything you want to keep (i.e. the foreground) and with red anything you want to lose. The tool will do the rest, even giving your remaining image a neat feathered edge so it fits seamlessly over your background.

There’s a similar tool in Microsoft Office 2010/2013, though I won’t cover that here as many readers won’t have it.

Where you’re lucky enough to have a single-coloured background that you want to make transparent, this is pretty simple in most graphics packages (such as GIMP, Photoshop etc) and in Microsoft Office Word, Excel or Powerpoint since Office 2007. Simply select the background colour, choose Recolor and set that colour to transparent.